Medic Mobile

Medic Mobile, established in 2010 as a US 501(c)(3) public charity, focuses on advancing global health equity through open-source technology. The organization was co-founded by Josh Nesbit, who conceived the idea during his studies at Stanford University while researching a cholera outbreak in Malawi. Witnessing the communication challenges faced by frontline health workers, who often traveled long distances just to report basic information, inspired him to leverage simple mobile technology for better healthcare coordination. This early work, which involved using SMS to coordinate community health workers, laid the foundation for the organization's mission.

Medic Mobile acts as the technical steward and a primary contributor to the Community Health Toolkit (CHT), a free, open-source software platform. The CHT is designed to support health workers, especially in remote and hard-to-reach communities, by digitizing their workflows. This enables them to register families, conduct health assessments, report disease outbreaks, and manage stock levels directly from their mobile devices, often functioning without an internet connection. The toolkit facilitates data collection, care coordination, and provides automated messaging and decision support to guide health workers.

The organization's operational model is centered on partnerships. Medic Mobile collaborates with ministries of health, NGOs, and local organizations worldwide to deploy and scale digital health applications built using the CHT. While the software itself is free, the organization sustains its operations through grants and by providing technical assistance, project design, and support services to its partners. This approach allows local teams to adapt the technology to their specific needs, aiming to improve health outcomes in areas such as maternal and child health, immunization tracking, and disease surveillance. By 2024, the CHT had been deployed in at least 16 countries, supporting a significant number of health workers and households.

Keywords: community health, open-source software, global health equity, digital health, mHealth, community health toolkit, nonprofit, healthcare technology, remote communities, care coordination